Web fonts grow up: A look at the numbers

We’ve long believed that web fonts are a reality now. From the smallest of personal blogs, to some of the largest publishers on the web (including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and AOL, among others), web fonts are being adopted at a fast and growing rate.

It’s been a little over a year since Typekit opened its doors to the world. And in that time we have seen firsthand the enthusiasm for web fonts. As of today, Typekit is now serving fonts to over 100 million unique users and delivering nearly 400 million font views1 per month. This traffic is occurring on over 265 thousand kits (where each kit represents one or more unique domains) by people in 234 countries and territories. What’s more, these numbers are growing at a double-digit percentage every month.

This is a tremendous amount of growth and we’re not alone in our analysis; we worked with our friends at the Google Font API to assess the state of the market and their numbers are equally impressive. This parallel shows that you don’t have to wait to start using web fonts—they are an increasingly popular technology you can use on your sites today. Our numbers, along with Google’s, demonstrate that the enthusiasm for commercial fonts is as strong as for those that are free and open-source. There will always be more people choosing to use free fonts; but we’ve proven that there is also a healthy and growing market for premium, quality fonts.

And this is only the beginning. Web fonts have the potential to make the web a more readable, beautiful, and accessible place, and Typekit is committed to expanding their reach. We’re humbled by our success so far, and eager for what the future brings.

1. Font views are defined as the number of times one or more fonts were delivered to a web site.

I love the fact the Typekit and other font services are picking up, I would love to know the comparison of Free versus Paid font kits, just to get an idea of weather the its rolling out in a big way for businesses or just people wanting to try it out.